Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle.

• Author: McHugh, James
• Position: Book review

Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle. Edited by STEVEN E. LlNDQUlST. Cultural, Historical and Textual Studies of South Asian Religions. London.: ANTHEM PRESS, 2011. Pp. 392

This Festschrift in honor of Patrick Olivelle contains an impressive range of contributions, many by more junior scholars, and reflects the extent of Olivelle's research, teaching, and generous advising. The editor Steven Lindquist's introduction contains a short account and discussion of Olivelle's extensive body of scholarship, emphasizing the great variety of scholarship produced by his former students, especially studies with a focus on social history and religious identity. Thus the essays in the volume deal with historical periods from the Rg Veda to the present, and religious traditions from Hinduism to Manichaeism. With such a varied selection of high quality contributions, this book, like all the best Festschrifts, will long remain a repository of important scholarship on a number of topics as well as a source of intellectual pleasure.

The chapters are arranged in four sections and I present here just a small selection of the contents. In the first section dealing with "Word, Text, Context," the authors explore what we can say about the social and historical worlds of ancient texts, proposing some bold theses. Timothy Lubin presents a detailed discussion of the figure known as the "bath graduate" (sndtaka), a graduate of Veda study. He points out that in several texts the status of married householder and bath graduate are quite distinct. The bath graduate was actually subject to more rigorous rules of conduct. By implication it seems that the householder of classical Indian texts was by no means always a Veda graduate. Jarod Whitaker's theoretically subtle paper tackles what "lengthening life" may have meant in the ritual, social, and political world of the Rg Veda. Moving away from a literal interpretation of this concept in terms of some sort of magical thinking, he concludes that when poets prolong the life (ayus) of their patrons this "represents then a badge of membership within early Vedic society, as it is tantamount to declaring a commitment to the endless performance of rituals" (64). Brian Black's paper lays out a clear, literary reading of the Upanisads in terms of a rhetoric of secrecy. He suggests this explicitly esoteric discourse creates a sense that the Upanisads contain alternative, rare teachings...